Category: Verbatim

There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Hence to fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

— Sun Tzu Wu (ca. 500 B.C.), Army commander of the King of Wa

Education is a danger …. At best an education which produces useful coolies for us is admissible. Every educated person is a future enemy.

— Martin Bormann (1900-1945), German Nazi leader

The biggest need, the most urgent problem of each individual, of each person, is to understand life in its uni-total, integral form, because only in that way will we be in a condition to satisfactorily resolve our intimate problems. Our technical progress is fantastic, but it has only caused to augment our aggressive power to destruct each other, and everywhere terror, hunger, ignorance and sickness reign. No profession, no technology can ever give us that that is called plenitude, true happiness. In life, each one of us suffers intensely in his job, his profession, in his routinery way of life; and possessions and occupations become instruments of envy, gossip, hate and bitterness.

— Association of Gnostic Anthropology, Lesson No. 6: “The Human Machine & the Pluralized I”

Like officials in Washington, we suffer from Afghanistanism. If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close to home, it’s sociology.

— James Reston

The division of mankind threatens it with destruction. Civilization is imperiled by: a universal thermonuclear war, catastrophic hunger for most of mankind, stupefaction from the narcotic of “mass culture” and bureaucratized dogmatism, a spreading mass of myths that put entire peoples and continents under the power of cruel and treacherous demagogues.

— Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), Russian nuclear physicist

Women’s rights, men’s rights — human rights — all are threatened by the ever-present specter of war so destructive now of human material and moral values as to render victory indistinguishable from defeat.

— Rosika Schwimmer (1877-1948), American pacifist, feminist

It is painful to look at your father and realize the old man should not be allowed to manage his own money anymore. This is the discovery the country has made about the party in power. They are inept. The checkbook needs to be taken away. They will rant, they will screech, they will wave their canes at you and call you all sorts of names, but you have to do what you have to do.

— Garrison Keillor

Submitted by Tom Erickson

The War Prayer: O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be thou near them! O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief …. For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him who is the Source of Love, and who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all who are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

— Samuel Langhorne Clemens, “Mark Twain” (1835-1910), American writer

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.

— Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), American poet, writer